THOMAS HOOD, the most inveterate of all punsters and the most pathetic of English poets, was born in London, May 23d, 1799. He was intended for an engraver, and before giving up the idea of following that trade he had developed a faculty for drawing caricatures which almost spoiled him as an essayist. As a result of it, he illustrated his sketches and finally came into a totally depraved habit of writing sketches for his illustrations—as when he would construct a disquisition on “Van Diemen’s Land” in order to introduce a picture of an immigrant family, with “demons” swarming around them. If he wrote of Shakespeare it would be to introduce a picture of a matron of severe and menacing aspect, armed with the farces of maternity and explained by the quotation: “An eye like Ma’s (Mars) to threaten and command.” This is so characteristic of the prose of “Hood’s Own” that it is not worth while to attempt to detach the text from the punning pictures. It is on such jests, some of them forced when he was exceedingly sorrowful, that Hood’s reputation as a humorist chiefly depends. As a poet, he is one of the truest and tenderest who have ever written English. He died May 3d, 1845. His last lingering illness was glorified by the production of “The Bridge of Sighs,” written, it has been said, when he was already more than half in heaven.